Do You Run a Paid Newsletter?

I have a coaching student who is running a paid newsletter, published twice per month.

She only charges $12.50 per month and it contains great content, so subscribers tend to stick around for a long time.

The problem is getting the subscribers in the first place.

She had about 220 subscribers when she came to me, and she wanted to add a lot more.

The thing was, her paid advertising wasn’t converting well enough to keep paying for subscribers, so she felt sort of stuck.

I suggested that she offer the first two issues for free and see what happened to her conversions.

Mind you, this is not in the make money online niche. I wish I could say which niche it is, but I told her I would keep that confidential.

Anyway, she went back to doing paid advertising, with the only major change being that the first two issues were free.

The deal was if they like the newsletter, they do nothing and they pay $12.50 per month, starting with the second month.

Subscribership nearly doubled with this one change and she was able to buy all the advertising she wanted. In fact, she’s still advertising. I don’t know how many subscribers she’s up to now, but Isuspect it’s over 800.

Why do two free issues make such a difference?

Obviously, people like to get things for free, but I don’t think that’s the biggest draw. I think it’s that when they see you’re so confident in your newsletter that you’re willing to let them try it for free, it inspires confidence in them that they will love it.

After all, it’s a pain to enter your credit card info and then remember in 29 days to cancel. People know that. That’s why two free issues alone isn’t enough – it’s the confidence you inspire by offering those free issues.

I should note that she has tons of testimonials on her sales page. Really, it’s a slam dunk to get sales now.

But we didn’t stop there, because she also sells advertising inside of her newsletter. And most of this advertising is actually sold to the subscribers themselves.

Here’s what we did...

On the page offering advertisements inside the newsletter, we offered an option for three ads for the price of two ads, paid up front.

There are three different ad sizes offered, and we offered this deal on all three sizes. Then we said it was a limited offer and installed a countdown clock.

We made the offer for 7 days, although since then we’ve discovered that 5 days seems to sell more than 7 days. As always, you’ve got to test these things to know, right?

Advertising sales more than doubled the first time we tried this. And since then, she opens up the offer twice a month for 5 days at a time, and it sells like hotcakes every time.

And here’s the thing – you’d think she only has so much room for the ads and no more, right? Except that of course her newsletter is virtual, and so what she did when she started getting all these extra ad orders was to write a few more articles to expand the newsletter and place the ads around the articles.

No one complains when your newsletter goes from 12 pages to 16 pages with the addition of more articles, even if there are more ads.

And in her niche, I suspect readers like the ads almost as much as the articles. But even if they didn’t, readers are getting a great deal because now the newsletter is bigger, yet the price has stayed the same.

Now she’s of course getting her monthly recurring income from subscribers, and twice a month she gets a bunch of payments for ads. And of course, now she’s able to pay for as much advertising as she wants, because the two free issues deal has made it so profitable. The advertising money is just gravy on top of... well... gravy, I suppose.

Something to think about if you have a newsletter or you’ve been thinking of launching one.